Tag Archives: miracle berry

List Item: Try three quarters of the 1001 Foods You Must Try Before You DieFood item: Miracle Berry

They say that food is the best way to a man’s heart, well happy birthday to me because my husband bought me one of the coolest. I’ve wanted to give miracle berries a go since I first saw them in an episode of United States of Tara some eight years.

The idea behind trying out these berries (which originally come from West Africa) is that they trick your taste-buds into perceiving sour flavours as sweet. So the best way to experience them is to amass a selection of sour food and drink and get ready for things to taste weird. The berry itself… tastes a bit sour, but there’s nothing special about that.

As you can see from the picture, I got a lot of different things based on the many recommendations that can be found online. Since there is too much here to go really in depth (also, the berry only lasted around 20 minutes, so there was a lot of trying different things before the berry wore off). But here’s a summary:

Guinness – Many people likened this to a chocolate milkshake, but I didn’t get anything like that. Instead it became creamier and less bitter.

Cream cheese – Sweeter and a bit like a cheesecake filling without the vanilla.

Lemon juice – Like a very sweet and concentrated lemonade. Delicious and it became the way I could work out if the berry was still working.

Grapefruit juice – One of the sweetest things I tried. Usually I can’t drink this because of how bitter it is, but with the berry it was great.

Distilled malt vinegar – This became just like a balsamic vinegar that you could drink.

Pineapple – You could still feel your mouth pucker because of the acidity, but instead it tasted like artificial pineapple flavour from sweets.

Hot sauce – The Tabasco ended up tasting like sweet chilli sauce. I couldn’t even feel the heat.

Sour candy – As expected, super super sweet.

Lemon – Like you had dipped the lemon in sugar, really delicious.

Lime – A disappointment, without the sourness a lot of the flavour was gone.